Next book

BLUE IN A RED STATE

A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO LIFE IN THE REAL AMERICA

From Massachusetts and Florida to Montana and Alaska, with each chapter, both conservative and liberal readers will react...

Krebs (538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal, 2010) seeks to paint a portrait of liberals living among the enemy, as it were, by choice.

As a campaign director for MoveOn.org and founder of Living Liberally, a national network of political social clubs, the author writes knowledgeably about people across the country—in Waukesha, Wisconsin; Little Elm, Texas; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Pawleys Island, South Carolina; Pomeroy, Iowa; and elsewhere—who have chosen to stay in a politically unwelcoming environment for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s home, where they were raised. For others, they state that it’s not so bad and that there are residents who, like them, think liberally but keep quiet about it. Many stay because moving to a big city, college, or coastal town is too much like giving up; plus, there’s no challenge there. The author proclaims that equating churches with conservatism is as wrong as equating atheists with liberalism. Furthermore, there are radicals in every way of thought, and liberalism is not immune. Some liberals quietly listen but stand up when called for, giving to and taking part in their communities. Others live provocatively, with bumper stickers and lawn signs for elections, always ready to jump into the fight. The majority love where they live, and they count on their neighbors and return the favor. One woman said her town was a great place to live; it just had no health care, maintained infrastructure, or working educational system. Another mentions that many of the residents think that the recycling program is a socialist plot. Throughout, Krebs approaches his subjects with candor and respect.

From Massachusetts and Florida to Montana and Alaska, with each chapter, both conservative and liberal readers will react strongly, but most will do nothing about it. Hopefully, however, the book will spur discussion and civic action.

Pub Date: March 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59558-972-9

Page Count: 208

Publisher: The New Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Next book

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

Close Quickview